[pracjourn-forum] Re: Another newby question: Finding documentation

[Jim Hefferon]

Hello,

       So, if and when package uploads to CTAN become more and more
       TDS-compliant, will it be easy to specify searches for official
       documentation within the corresponding /doc/ ?

   The TDS is not primarily for CTAN (though many large packages follow
   it), it's for runtime distributions.  

I'm not perfectly sure what was meant by these two posts, but may I write
in about them anyway?  After all, this is the Internet.  ;-}

I agree with Karl that the directory layout used by CTAN as an archive
does not follow the directory layout used on the hard drives of end-users.
For instance, we keep a packages documentation with the package (which makes
sense for people downloading a package) while TDS tries to keep it in a
separate directory on a user's machine.

But Tze KWANG Teo, the OP, could mean this: some authors are starting to 
upload their package to be left on CTAN in a format that unzips into a 
TDS tree.  Thus, my shadethm package is now on CTAN as:

  macros/latex/contrib/shadethm/
                               shadethm.sty
                               1st_read.me

while what a few authors are asking for is to leave it as

  macros/latex/contrib/shadethm/
                               tex/latex/shadethm/
                                                  shadethm.sty
                               doc/latex/shadethm/
                                                  1st_read.me

(or something like that).  If that is what the OP meant then the question
  
  So, if and when package uploads to CTAN become more and more 
  TDS-compliant, will it be easy to specify searches for 
  official documentation within the corresponding /doc/ ?

becomes more like (as I understand it), "Will there be a search button 
on CTAN that looks in the doc subdirectories of individual packages?"
I take this to be more of a suggestion than a question.

The short answer is, "I don't know; it is a suggestion worth thinking about."
There are two factors here.

  * The number of authors who do the TDS thing is at this moment tiny.

  * This is bound up in the larger question of a standard upload/download
    format.  In another place, Karl described this initiative as "stalled"
    but I'd describe it as "suspended" or "pending."  (I personally hope
    to work on it when I finish what I am working on now.)

    Just as a comment, the metadata format that we are going to, and which
    Robin Fairbairns is doing yeoman's work on populating, has a field for
    documentation on CTAN and also one for documentation off CTAN so 
    searching the packaged documentation is not bound to the TDS format. 

  Karl also said:
   There is inevitably a lag between CTAN updates and distribution updates;
   being able to search CTAN directly would be useful regardless of what is
   available in the distributions.

And also one (smaller) between CTAN updates and Google updates, which is 
a (small) reason for CTAN to have a search engine ourselves. 

Jim